Astrophotography

Stars

Hey there! This is my first time writing a blog post with the new markdown system of Astro, quite convenient to use. I planned to publish this post on the 8th of September, but life sometimes does other stuff with your time. But let’s stop blabbering.

Dusting off the telescope

Yeah, I packed my telescope out of the garage room and dusted it off. Collimated the mirror back to the right position, took the mirror apart because it was dirty and did the whole alignment again. Silly me was just a bit too fast.

Gear trouble on shoot night

On the day I started to photograph I noticed that my telescope’s holding gear was loose. Oh boy, that was not fun. The azimuth gear drive decided not to work. Later I found out that the drive snail had come loose and was no longer aligned with the teeth of the gears. It came loose and the azimuth control was free to rotate.

Fighting with focus

I wished to use my telescope to take pictures with my Sony Alpha 6000 camera or with the ASI ZWO telescope camera. I noticed that I still hadn’t solved the problem with the focus. There was also the trouble of aligning to the Newton telescope’s focus. I didn’t get a clear picture, I think I’d forgotten after 6 years that that’s the reason I quit doing astrophotography with a telescope. I think I didn’t have enough backfocus. But here I’m really clueless. Some tips on how to do it correctly would really help. I also have a Bahtinov mask to help me focus, but I didn’t want to focus on a plant or the moon. My plan was to capture 10 second exposure images of the Perseid meteor stream.

Switching to the Sony Alpha

I moved to my trusty Sony Alpha 6000 and its 50 mm f1.4 lens, with this I took the images you can see down below.

As you see, I tried to stack the images. Here I am still searching for the correct stacker or just a way to do it correctly. I am using Linux and I still don’t have all the software I used to have on Windows a long time ago.

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The night sky

Equipment used

• Sony Alpha 6000
• Newton Telescope
  • Barlow lens 2x
  • Barlow lens 1.5x